MOVING TARGETS
he Gun Club plays for keeps. Their songs crackle like dry corpse skin turning to parchment under the caress of a rattlesnake belly. Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Gun Club's leader and songwriter, is a Texan, and the hollow wind of the prairie echos painfully through his tortured, shrieking vocals.
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MOVING TARGETS
GUN CLUB Miami
(Animal/Chrysalis)
by j. poet
The Gun Club plays for keeps. Their songs crackle like dry corpse skin turning to parchment under the caress of a rattlesnake belly. Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Gun Club's leader and songwriter, is a Texan, and the . hollow wind of the prairie echos painfully through his tortured, shrieking vocals. When he sings you can almost feel an eroding riverbed beneath your feet and sense the frenzy of a man about to .collapse like some sun-baked sharefcropper's shack after running too long and too hard to escape from a terror he doesn't quite realize is being carried within the confines of his own wounded heart.
Take 'Run Through The Jungle,' the old Creedence chestnut, for example. It's noisily demolished and transformed into a primordial tale of misery. The new lyrics are replete with jealous murder and hints of necrophilia, with a bit of neo-pagan philosophizing thrown in for good measure. 'Calling Up Thunder' starts off with the first dozen notes of 'Dixie' and continually repeats them, giving the track a feel something like Sun-Recordsmeets-an-Italian-B-Westem. 'Watermelon Man' is full of big empty spaces wherein a supersonic distortion guitar buzzes like a horde of giant mosquitoes; and sports a vocal that's one long incoherent moan of angst.
Every track on Miami shines like a fresh drop of blood. The album's a festival of dirty R&B zombie bass, amphetamine comedown amputee guitar lines that make the teeth gnash with tension, vocals that scream like lonesome ambulance sirens, and powerful garage drumming that grabs the guts like a short circuiting pacemaker. The songs, tangled visions of the endless urban nightmare, slash like the rusty razors, dance like bleached skeletons and sing with the numbed lips of a bag lady on Romilar. The playing throughout has a kind of desperately driven psychosis of the lyrics. Like the boozers, losers and bluesers he so admires, Jeffrey Lee Pierce burns with the dark fire that can transform the bewildering pain of self destruction into great art.
